The ultimate Queenager. (The Devil Wears Prada 2/IMDB)
In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg suggested that women should think of corporate careers as climbing frames, not ladders: more room at the top for all. But either way, climbing is harder on estrogen-depleted knees. In the past few weeks, there has been a spate of stories about middle-aged ladies suddenly flung from the very top rungs, unable to gracefully remount.
The catalyst for the discourse was former Elle fashion editor Stacey Duguid, aged 52, a high-octane glamourpuss whose candid social media posts about her own precarious employment situation have gone viral. As she told The Times, in the past 18 months she has applied for “everything from a brand director on six figures to a part-time job taking photos in a warehouse”, all to no avail. She says she is now on universal credit, has had to sell her jewelry on Vinted, and put her Menorcan holiday home on the market.
As usual with articles aimed at the female market, there are a number of things going on here at once. Come for the inspirational taboo-busting and rejection of societal shame; stay for the schadenfreude; leave with vague anxiety that you too might soon be on the scrapheap. But in Duguid’s case, the reality is surely more complicated than recent coverage suggests. By her own account, this is not her first midlife crisis. Three years ago, she wrote an eye-wateringly frank book about the wild aftermath of a divorce. It included tales of drinking on the day job, drug-fueled one-night-stands with much younger men, and being told by otherworldly voices to make expensive clothing purchases on credit. She joked at the time that it should have been called Cocktails, Cock and Coke: A Middle-Aged Adventure. It is not inconceivable that prospective employers have read it too.
But perhaps she has identified a more general phenomenon. Other stories have followed, of former high-flying ladybosses sending out hundreds of applications into the void, while burning through their savings and feeling humiliated. One theme is the impossibility of remaking oneself from scratch in middle age. Steph Walsh, 50, who once earned £120,000 as a chief of staff but now scrapes by making video animations and getting gifts from relatives, told the The Times: “I reject the narrative of midlife reinvention; there should be no need for it at all and women more than men have to absorb the consequences.” Duguid herself says that “we can’t just simplify things to a midlife image overhaul”.
This seems true, despite the fact that Duguid is, precisely, using the moment for an image overhaul. She has created a new organization, the Encore, to fight for women “overlooked by hiring processes that seem designed to screen us out, and silenced by a shame that was never ours to carry”. Meanwhile Walsh says she is now writing a book about redundancy and the “fallacy of midlife reinvention”, which also sounds like midlife reinvention to me. Both women appear to be following a well-worn path for corporates who encounter career adversity: reframe the moment as a learning opportunity for others, then make capital out of that.
Another example is journalist Eleanor Mills, a former editor at The Sunday Times before she was axed at 50. After a self-described period of panicking and weeping, she started an organization called Noon, aimed at demonstrating that “midlife is an age of opportunity”. “Long lives mean we will all have to get used to reinventing ourselves”, she says on the website. The organization runs meetups and retreats for distressed gentlewomen — more diplomatically referred to onsite as “queenagers” — hosted by the sort of LinkedIn denizen with big jewelry who says she is passionate about transformation, life balance, and finding joy in everyday moments. Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that the main option for the newly unemployed menopausal high earner is to recreate yourself as a life coach or therapist for other newly unemployed menopausal high earners. There is surely a limit to how long this scheme can sustain itself.
It’s also tempting to wonder whether there is a real problem to be addressed here. Unemployment and unexpected penury are blights on any life, at any age; but I’m skeptical there is a burning issue for (formerly) well-heeled middle-aged women in particular. The economic inactivity rate for women aged 50 to 64 is higher than that for men in the same age group, but economic inactivity is not unemployment: a large chunk of this, according to ONS figures, is women (and men, for that matter) who are deemed too ill or disabled to work. Another chunk is women “looking after home or family”. I have trouble believing this is a huge problem for boardroom types, tending as they do to pay others to do that kind of thing. Perhaps the corporate world is not well set up to accommodate hot flashes, brain fog, or mad dashes up the motorway to deal with health crises of aging parents; but still, I’m fairly sure provision is better than for the average supermarket or care home worker.
The main allegation of Duguid’s is that women like her are being winnowed out of the application pool by AI systems, before any human eyes have seen their scintillating CVs. But again, this is a problem that affects a much wider group of job seekers — perhaps even most these days. The real worry is the reliance of employers on a small set of AI systems, so that the same algorithms are relentlessly applied, removing the element of serendipitous chance that used to be ineliminable in hiring. Young people are also said to be struggling with the brutal impersonality of the machines. It seems very bad for a 20-something not to be able to get a foot in the door, thanks to the bots; much worse than to be pushed out of it in your fifties at 100K.
Indeed, though it perhaps seems cruel to kick struggling women when they are down, there is a whiff of selfishness about this discourse. When Duguid tells the interviewer of a “former executive for a high street brand” she knows who is now on universal credit, or of a “chemical engineer who is cleaning holiday lets for cash”, the unfortunate implication is that this is all shockingly beneath such highly credentialed people, though perfectly fine for the plebs. Mills writes on her website that when she lost her newspaper job, she felt “raw, naked … I’d worn a big velvet cloak of status for two decades, now it was gone”. Shame is a constant theme of the narratives we are offered. What seems to really sting is not the lack of income, but the lack of validation: if I am not impressing someone with my glamorous job, do I really exist at all?
If this is right, the worry is unsurprising. For decades, university-educated women have been encouraged to think that breaking the glass ceiling is more validating and meaningful than washing the kitchen floor; and also to think that the kind of part-time job that allows you to prioritize family and domesticity is embarrassing and meaningless. Of course the idea is absurd; there are very few things done for large amounts of money that make life meaningful. Still, assuming that you are very attached to being the sort of woman who changes her work handbag every season, it is bound to come as a shock to find you are an expendable drone like the rest.
Duguid says she is now “botoxing” her CV, taking out any references to age and experience that might meet the disapproval of the machines. I would probably do this too, were I frustrated enough (though admittedly, I probably wouldn’t give newspaper interviews citing my age and work history at the same time). But there is something very queasy about it. For the truth is that, once you have reached a certain level of seniority in a career, you can’t reinvent yourself as a fresh-faced ingenue, even metaphorically speaking. You are far too well-defined in your character, skills, and preferences; too inflexible in your personality. Employers are not wrong to be wary of formerly senior applicants for entry-level jobs, for they are unlikely to be a good fit. And in any case, we oldies need to leave those jobs to the young people.
In years to come, as AI conquers various sectors and competition for fewer desirable opportunities increases, we can look forward to the grim possibility of PR battles between various interest groups, each telling highly emotive tales about who is struggling most. We should probably remember that some will have an advantage over others here. Free-falling from the climbing frame can certainly be terrifying — but a fat media contacts book and a holiday home in Menorca can help cushion the fall.
